Five Poems

by Brandon Shane

Defects

A man on the floor

looks like a kite without air,

having given up on

ascending familiar sights.

Some kites were never

meant to fly, but examples

of why one should.

At night, my father drank,

and was quiet and dull

after the fifth or sixth,

which meant my mother

did not mind the seventh

or eighth.

And no one saw his truck

as it barreled into a ditch,

a kite wouldn’t have seen it

at night, there was just a crunch

of metal and nothing exploded.

At-least he didn’t end up

killing someone, I heard

someone say. My father

didn't like that I loved men,

and sometimes those his age,

and it hurt more because

I didn’t love him.

I was a child looking for feeling,

having thought I had travelled

the end of my road, and still,

I think I have cheated life

having tugged the earth

until it gave me a trail.

Every time I see a kite,

I look up at the sky, feel

the sun and the clouds at war,

having managed to pick up

a little bit of wind.

Red Bricks

I walked into the garden, the flowers were gone,

it was in the heap of spring; crows were balancing delicate

on wire. It was hot, and all my memories had evaded me,

knowing there was once something in this empty room

the aching joints were proof, the roughness of my hands,

dust mounting on the ground, like a burning plane

sprawling to nothingness.

I looked back at the house, and there was a man knocking

on the door. My mother was inside, telling him to leave,

the only thing between them a dingy lock

decorative like a powdered wig

covering sores.

She was younger there, had yet to be buried

and the man was handsome

the type of stranger I would date.

I sat on the steps behind them, as they began to argue,

my back turned and their voices rising. 

Along the white clouds, the blue sky like chrysanthemums,

I thought Archangel Michael had returned

trailing across the sky, his wings recently stitched,

thinking Armageddon had come,

my lungs unable to beat the air out,

the crows cawing in laughter.

I thought what a fool I was, stuck here for decades now

racing around a circular track, thinking

there was somewhere else to go.

God had been hiding in my tear ducts

watch him trail down my cheek;

he is not an adventurous traveler.

Look at my mother screaming,

listen to the baby crying

as he walks out,

thinking about the bar

and the many women

waiting for him.

Wood Cutter

I dreamt of a door, a wide frame,

wood from a lumberjack, a man who did it all,

and I thought of his scarred hands, his rough kiss, 

if he ever kissed in earnest, and I was sick

thinking of his love,

clenched fists in the aftermath of hard toil

only knowing the axe and hunched back,

evening demands, work, work, work. 

He has been wasted and properly used,

having taken the world's brutality

from the child, from the wife,

only to impose his own.

The nights have known him to be still,

shoulders but scarecrows for the birds,

listening to river water,

lacking retreat as rain washes

over the crest of clouds,

and at times there is a smile,

and it sinks in the way of dying.

He spreads the door apart,

looks upon his wife,

the children having eaten

now holding their breaths,

her life wrapped in a novel

that dangles from her fingers,

he is twitching,

the coals of childhood

being shoveled into a pit.

I think, fanning myself

under the sun, the monsters 

of our world will forever

be loved, and sitting up

to drink my iced coffee,

hawthorn drifts

from among distant roses

and I smell the last

of the good men.

Piano Man

I thought I saw you in the garden,

lying atop the rocks between flowers,

but you were in bed coughing,

sick and unwise.

The ways in which I try

to convince myself of your health,

they are hallucinations of you cooking

and dancing when no-one is watching.

I always thought it would be me,

a lifetime of bad dieting and laziness,

but there seems to be an irony

built into existence,

the octogenarian drinking whiskey,

young athlete who did everything textbook,

I look at the mudslides and storms

the left-over earth rushing downhill,

rain falling onto a town destroyed by fire

or outside your window after thinking

tonight is the night I go.

I want to tell you I love you, again, and again,

but after a while it just sounds like a common

greeting, like the painful groans that first

kept me up for weeks, but are now birds

skipping off the rooftop.

Alone on the porch, I think

it was all a ruse, the flashing lights and

children's laughter, strangers screaming

into the void of their frustrating lives,

the way the universe bends towards mockery,

it makes me ill.

Soulmates

Even as he laughs

and I have achieved this

purported happiness,

I keep track of the door

how it opens and locks,

knowing the things

that were reasons for love

become the explanations

for divorce or extrication,

and the pots and pans

widen along the burners

sugar becomes bitter

the shower darkens

remembering how

you used to do it together,

and someone else

becomes tender,

and tender, patience

turns into snapping peas

arguments happen first

in the mind, frustration

happening in the real

and abstract and

the guilt is a reason for

anger and knowing

you owe and deserve

an apology, having sex

you notice the awful things

of the human species

and blame it on them,

unveiled and spiny

along the leaves,

and thinking of your parents

you begin to feel an awe

and terror, that they

swallowed decades

of this, and you

have yet to add a second

number.

BIO: Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in trampset, The Chiron Review, IceFloe Press,The Argyle Literary Magazine, Berlin Lit, Sontag Mag, Acropolis Journal, Grim & Gilded, Ink in Thirds, Dark Winter Lit, Resurrection Mag, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English.